Sure, Crocs are cool but they’re still ugly

The latest trend in footwear seems to be part of an entire ‘ugly’ fashion movement.

When did people stop caring about how they look?

It’s hard to appreciate the allure of ugly shoes. Take a recent sighting of a young woman, svelte and stylish in a sheath dress. She is tottering and a glance at her footwear explains all. Her shoes have black straps like giant slugs devouring her toes and platform soles that resemble those concrete boots they use to disappear people (not that I’m overly familiar with that sort of footwear). She is half shoe.

If I stayed on that boardwalk longer I’d have seen platform sneakers with flanged soles that could work as a shuttle landing pad; ankle boots atop a tsunami of a heel and Crocs covered in bling, raised on platforms and sprinkled with flowers. Crocs were the start of this two decades ago and they’ve returned to prove they are the ugliest of all.

Ugly is now something of a movement. It has infiltrated attire where you’re meant to look like you’ve rushed into a charity shop, grabbed whatever was nearest and put it all on so you look like a walking wardrobe. It’s also having a moment in home decor, which not only joyously mixes fabrics and styles but also teases with an item that is almost grotesque – a sculpture of a giant toe, a family portrait of an ugly dog in regency wear or a Rococo framed mirror that a wealthy widow of the 1980s once adored.

Speaking of dogs, I wonder how much this trend is responsible for the ugly dogs on boardwalks and Insta – the runts that need prams, the dogs that can’t breathe properly, the whippets so fragile a sneeze might break their neck. I suppose you’re not meant to call them ugly. But they are.

There’s the possibility that ugliness is an effort to reclaim one’s identity, especially from the male gaze

We’ve had ugly fashions before but the difference is that the boo boos of the past – metre-high powdered wigs, cod pieces, shoulder pads that enabled women to play front row forward – were considered attractive at the time. This fashion is designed to look ugly right now.

Which is why I find it so hard to fathom. And, even as I write that, I can see that that might be the point. Ugly challenges the status quo. It is a jolt to the accepted aesthetic.

This raised middle finger is most pointedly aimed at the industries around fashion that dictate a look – a look that is enmeshed in the consumerist culture that many young (and often poor) people reject in principle. But it’s also aimed at people like me with ingrained ideas about what it acceptable, what works, what’s appropriate and what might drown you if you step off a boardwalk in them. People who know what sort of heel to wear with a fitted skirt might be out of fashion but they’re still imbued with its principles.

And then there’s the possibility that ugliness is an effort to reclaim one’s identity, especially from the male gaze. Ugly is a message that you’re not bothered to dress to impress; you’re not inviting admiring glances; you’re just not interested in what anybody thinks. Kitten heels be damned. It’s radical. Radical in a way that tie-dyed T-shirts never were. More radical that bikie jackets and Doc Martens. More challenging than religious garb or inked bodies or comb-overs or pneumatic lips.

I’m beginning to like ugly, I said to a designer friend. That’s good, she replied, because it’s popping up in advertising, where the look is early internet, a grab bag of images and type that your uncle cobbled together for his small business.

Just as well I’ve got my head around it, then. I wonder if there’s such a thing as ugly writing yet? Um, best not ask that.

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